Sunday, June 19, 2005

French prisons are teeming with Muslims, a phenomenon chaplains and sociologists blame on marginalization and towering poverty and unemployment rates among the Muslim minority. “It really harms the image of Islam and Muslims in France that prisons are teeming with Muslims,” Mamdo Sango, a Muslim chaplain, told IslamOnline.net. Iranian-French researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar said in his recently published book Islam in Prisons that Muslims make up some 70 percent of a total of 60,775 prisoners in France. As ethnicity-based censuses are banned in France, he said complexion, names and religious traditions like prohibition of pork indicate that Muslims constitute an overwhelming majority in prisons. French analysts further warned that prisons might be a breeding ground for extremists. Prison authorities have even become phobic about rising fanaticism in prisons to the extent that they sometimes deny Muslim prisoners the right to have prayer rugs.

5 Comments:

I'd like to know what percentage of them are immigrants as opposed to French by birth. And what percentage of the immigrants already had criminal records. The article also had a telling sentence:

"Although none of the French Muslim organizations approached by IOL had a clear answer to the mind-boggling phenomenon, some heaped blame on failed integration policies."

This is typical -- Muslim organizations are good at laying blame but never have solutions. And for some reason they can't seem to grasp the fact that integration is a two-way street. After all, they are in France -- not the Middle East.